12 Days of Holiday Movies: Jingle Jangle

Welcome to day one of The Gateway’s 12 Days of Holiday Movies! Every weekday from Dec. 14 to Dec. 29, we’ll be sharing a holiday movie that makes us laugh, cry, and do everything in between. Come along and find the next movie to add to your holiday watchlist!

There comes a moment in every contrarian’s life when you’re confronted by some irresistible fact that makes you question your previous hot takes.

It might take the form of an objectively good song by an artist you loathe (for me it’s “Wow.” by Post Malone), an intelligent point made by your sworn nemesis, or if you’re a self-proclaimed hater of musicals like me, it just might be Netflix’s new holiday special, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey.

Jingle Jangle stars Forest Whitaker, Keegan-Michael Key, Ricky Martin, and Madalen Mills, and it tells the story of Jeronicus Jangle, a genius toymaker who loses everything after being betrayed by his apprentice. Jeronicus slowly becomes a bitter and resentful old man, but following a visit from his equally brilliant granddaughter Journey, the two set off on a race against the clock to save Jeronicus’ shop before Christmas Day, all the while teaching him to dream again.

If you’re a grinch like me, that synopsis probably made you vomit a little in your mouth, but trust me, it’s actually really good.

Jingle Jangle is set in the kind of 18th century cottage town that seems purpose-built to celebrate Christmas, and the story is told with the refreshing silliness of a movie fully aware that it’s a holiday musical full of magical toys, singing townspeople, and horny mail carriers (and yes, you read that last one correctly). The movie’s metaphysical reality is even in on the joke, with math equations bearing names like “The Circumference of Spectacular,” “The Second Derivative of Sensational,” and “The Square Root of Possible.”

The diversity of Jingle Jangle’s cast and storytelling is another element that helped win me over. You don’t realize it until you watch a movie that has a truly international cast, but most Christmas movies don’t take diversity much further than maybe singing “Feliz Navidad.” It’s also great to see Jingle Jangle’s approach towards diversity go beyond casting and into the storytelling, because call it what you want, but there are few better ways to spend a holiday evening than watching a Victorian-era Forest Whitaker dance to Afrobeats during a snowball fight.

What really makes Jingle Jangle work is that it never tries to be anything more than what it is, which is a storybook Christmas musical made for a $10 per month streaming site. Jingle Jangle’s playful silliness is definitely worth a late night binge, and even if it isn’t enough to make stop cringing at the thought grown adults spontaneously breaking out into song and dance, it definitely helped my musical-hating heart grow a few sizes this holiday season. 

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey is available to stream on Netflix Canada.